


"Don't Feed The Birds"

by crush (beekeepercain)



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Blood and Injury, Cutting, Gen, Hurt Sam Winchester, Hurt/Comfort, Suicide Attempt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-28
Updated: 2015-12-28
Packaged: 2018-05-09 23:13:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,882
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5559365
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beekeepercain/pseuds/crush
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Whatever it is, it’s Dean who can’t make sense of what he’s seeing, and he’s not drunk, just... moving in slow motion. A step inside the bathroom. He’s kneeling down. Reaching out. Slowly. His left ear is ringing. All of it is so... blurred - Sam, too. The cuts on his arm. The all too familiar glaze over his eyes. The jagged knife on his lap. And he’s <i>smiling</i>, that fuckhead. He’s <i>smiling</i>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	"Don't Feed The Birds"

* * *

 

He’s drunk. Not thinking clearly. That’s all Dean can make of it when he stands there, the world strangely soundless like someone’s turned the volume down and mixed the sound of his heartbeat to the front. Slowed down, like drums in the distance.

_Thum. Thum. Thum._

But whatever it is, it’s Dean who can’t make sense of what he’s seeing, and he’s not drunk, just... moving in slow motion. A step inside the bathroom. He’s kneeling down. Reaching out. Slowly. His left ear is ringing. All of it is so... blurred - Sam, too. The cuts on his arm. The all too familiar glaze over his eyes. The jagged knife on his lap. And he’s _smiling,_ that fuckhead. He’s _smiling._

“Sammy. _Sam._ ”

Everything’s... wet. The shower is on, and the floor is flooded. But Sam’s hair is not, half of his body is not - he’s just sitting there on the floor next to the shower in the nude like he had every intention of going in there, but somehow fell down before reaching it and the knife... it just doesn’t make any goddamn sense.

Dean has one hand wrapped around the pulsing, sticky red wrist, but he’s not looking at it even though he knows he should be. He’s looking at his brother, the gentle turn of his pink, parted lips, the dark circles around his eyes, the hazy green with a golden ring surrounding a dilated pupil, the sharp tip of his nose and the dry swipe of blood over it. Sam lifts a hand, too; it hovers half-way to its destination, trembling, not quite strong enough to reach across the space between them. Finally, when Dean’s already frozen on spot, breath hitching, it lands on him, fingers bending around his flannel. There’s a layer of tears in Sam’s eyes. Dean’s never seen them that clear before.

“You stupid... you - goddamnit, you fucking...”  
It’s Dean’s voice, but Dean’s not sure what he’s trying to say. 

He wants to push Sam back and hit his head to the wall and scream at him and yell at him but he can’t do any of that, he’s just pulling him close and the tip of the knife slips between his legs and the tip of it drags along the floor beneath them, grinds against the ceramic tiles. His brother is so warm against him, so big, nothing like the small boy he used to hug all the time, grown up so... _solid_  and real, and he smells iron like they’re surrounded by the rusting carcasses of cars at a junkyard. Blood drips from Sam’s arm inbetween his fingers and down on the floor and with every pulse, there’s a flood of it.

“Stay with me.”  
 _You piece of shit.  
_

There’s some kind of a darkness between one moment and another. The blur rushes to the front, takes away a moment, a few good seconds; the next thing Dean knows, Sam’s against the wall, eyes half-lidded, and he’s got a bandage in his hands that he’s tying up around his little brother’s arm like he’s trying to squeeze it off. He’s got blood in his mouth, God knows how it got there but it’s _everywhere_  now, on the floor and on his clothes and all over Sam’s skin on the side that the shower's spray isn’t constantly washing off, and his breath is hitching. There’s a phone peeking out of the pocket of Sam’s jeans, the iPhone they argued over just last month - “God, Sam, you don’t need that, you’re just going to have to throw it out anyway” against “I don’t have to live like it’ll all be over tomorrow, Dean, I’m tired of it” - and Dean’s hand smears red all over the fabric when he reaches for it.

“911, what’s your emergency?”

_My brother’s dying. It’s not a black dog. It’s not a vampire. It’s not a werewolf. I don’t know what it is. I don’t understand._

“I need an ambulance.”

The words just flow right past the noise in his head, past the questions, the never-ending rush of  _please don’t leave me please don’t leave me please don’t leave me God I will die without you I need you I can’t live without you I’m so scared Sammy what did you do?_  and his voice is almost calm, almost matter-of-factly, stating the location, address, type of injury, all kinds of details that make perfect sense to tell, like that the artery is open and it’s not withdrawing or clotting but he’s making a tourniquet, and the bleeding is slowing down. The phone is pressed between his cheek and his shoulder as he ties up a flannel around the bandage, and there’s blood on it, he can feel the thick sticky wetness between his cheek and the phone’s screen every time he shifts. His legs tremble when he reaches for the first-aid kit again, throws it all over the floor, struggles to catch another roll of bandages. The phone slips down and hits the floor; the screen fractures, spreading a white web over the corner. Dean leaves it there, there’s no time to pick it up.

He brings his brother’s hand on his lap and turns the bleeding wrist up - there are two cuts, one much deeper than the other and the other gaping open revealing more skin at the bottom, the last line of defense still holding up. There’s acid at the back of his mouth when he starts wrapping the bandage around it all, layer after layer turning deep crimson as it makes contact with Sam’s skin, but the tourniquet is holding well and he’s wrapped up injuries before, he knows how to make the bandage stay still, how to tie it up tight enough to keep the blood where it belongs. It goes round and round and round and round and round and his heart is counting each turn with a painful beat, aching, until there’s no more bandage to use and the tourniquet has to come off. He doesn’t want to remove it, even though he knows the alternative is for Sam to lose a limb; it’s better than dying, it’s... it makes sense to leave it on. Still, with his hands trembling, he starts undoing it, and it’s so tight his fingertips hurt when he tears apart the knots and starts tugging the cloth off from around the first bandage. He’s taken a full eternity to concentrate on it, not a glance towards his little brother, but once it’s loose, even though it scares him, he steals one anyway. Sam’s resting still against the wall, the smile gone from his lips, eyes closed and head tilted against the sink’s basin. 

The moment blurs again, and Dean’s afraid he’s blacking out. It takes a while for his vision to clear up and for his brain to make sense of things again, but when he’s back there, back in control, he finds himself standing where the shower was spraying before, now without the sound of it keeping him company. He’s shaking when he kneels back down, eyes upon the bloody arm he’s propped up on the chair with all the clothes and whatever remains of the first-aid kit, but he gives himself a second to reach out for Sam instead; he brings his brother against him, holds him close, lets his head fall back over his chest and he’s counting seconds, afraid to take his pulse, afraid to face up with the very real possibility that he was much too late. 

“Cut across the street, you fucking idiot,” he mutters, and he’s finally crying, finally blind from tears building up in his eyes, “It’s like you don’t even want to die.”

Yet that’s all he is now, silent, dead weight against Dean, bloody and so goddamn beautiful underneath all of that, a vessel for a thousand stories, for things that can’t be put into words, something irreplaceable and unique and precious. In the midst of that stillness, his chest rises ever so slightly, and then never falls back down again - Dean can’t count a breath out of it, and the goddamn tears won’t let him see if it rises again.

How long was he going to wait? For two hours or more, knowing that Sam wasn’t sitting under cold water anyway? What was he thinking? The room outside the bathroom door flashes with red and blue, but Dean barely notices it. The world has toned back down to solitary heartbeats, moments that pass him in still pictures like he’s taking photographs of the motel room.

He wraps his arms more tightly around Sam’s body and buries his face into his hair, draws in a long breath with his eyes closed to have his scent fill his senses.

“I love you, baby brother.”

 

* * *

 

Like always, there’s a morning after. There’s the sound of fluttering wings when the pigeons depart from a rooftop, charge low above heads for the man on the bench outside the hospital with the bag of breadcrumbs next to a sign that says _“don’t feed the birds”._ There’s the early morning sunshine, the cold, crispy breeze of 7:30am that smells of gasoline and people hurrying for work. There’s the humming of engines and the beeping, beeping, beeping of machines everywhere - there’s the sound of a man breathing, and the silence that lingers where words can’t carry over the half-delivered messages.

“How do we evade the bills?” Sam asks after a decade has passed, and it’s the first thing he says since the “I’m sorry” he spoke when he first woke up hours ago in the stark unnatural light of the hospital room.

Dean doesn’t want to answer to him. He’s angry, it’s the only response he has to the situation, and he wants to tell Sam that they _won’t_  because he’s not walking out of this hospital, or if he is, it’s just to transfer to another. But he knows that’s not happening. He knows that in a few hours they’ll be fully dressed and walking out of the building pretending that they’re both just visitors on their way out, and they’ll jump into the car and they’ll drive off and never come back. Legally, neither of them exists. It’s only a matter of time before someone else realises the fact.

Instead of speaking, he reaches out for Sam, takes his hand in his own and leans back in his chair, slides down until he looks as if he’s collapsed into it, not like he’s sitting in it at all. Sam’s fingers bend loosely around his, and his hand is cold but Dean’s fingertips are colder.

“I’ve got it covered,” he finally says, “don’t worry about it.”

Sam nods. The noisy clock on the wall ticks forwards, and its sound echoes inside its frames. It’s driving Dean insane, the constant clicking, ticking, like a hammer banging against plastic. He closes his eyes and holds a little bit tighter, makes the room disappear and lets his voice out - he hums _Hey Jude_  until the ticking disappears, until the machines stop beeping, and until there’s nothing but the warmth that lingers between their hands, driving away the cold that has nested so deep within them both.

_Hey Jude, don't make it bad  
Take a sad song and make it better._


End file.
